Underfoot

The tourists are milling about the Mountain lookouts, taking snapshots and selfies of the sun-drenched ranges, but there is a long and winding road that leads to an entirely different view of the Blue Mountains. 

It is a route that requires carefull negotiation - in its upper reaches the kangaroos can take unwary speedsters by surprise, while, closer to the destination, the tight corners and steep grades demand patience and caution.

Eventually, the road brings you to a grand demonstration of the impact that water can have upon a landscape.....

....as well as the benefits humans can extract from that water and its surroundings.

The history of this place is a long and complex one - stretching through geological eons, along the ancient story lines and culture of the Gundungurra and Wiradjuri people, into a 21st century whose speleologists are still finding deeper tunnels and watercourses, far from the light of day.

Jenolan is possibly the best known cave complex in Australia, though far from the only one.  The caves open to the public are only a fraction of those known to the explorers and scientists, but many of the others would require a very strong personality, and skinny hips and ribs, on the part of any would be tourist.

 The forces that have carved, sculpted, and constructed the strange beauty in these caves are a complex mix of organic and inorganic chemistry, along with occasional bouts of the brute force that flood water can apply.

When you have finished underground, the views to be seen on the way back to the carpark are also wonderful......

 .....just kidding - there is a bus that will take you to the carpark at the other end of those stairs.  I kept looking, by the way, but saw no sign of orcs or dwarves, though you might wonder what those noises were, when the guide turned out all the lights, and darkness absolute surrounded you.

Knowing your world

It is said that many hunter-gatherer peoples offered thanks to the spirits of the animals and plants that they took for food, giving gratitude and respect for the gift of life.  And straight away, I must digress - I used that term "hunter-gatherer" because it is what I learned in school, over 50 years ago, and yet books like Dark Emu, by Dr. Bruce Pascoe, show just how intensively and intentionally those supposed "gatherers" intervened to increase the productivity of their territory.  Back to the story.

At some point in human history, before cities formed and empires grew, deities were named and thanked as being the directors or providers of weather, fertility, and food.  Stories of creation were told, genealogies handed down, and sagas and epics were chanted to remind us of the deeds and misdeeds of our ancestors and their enemies.  People could identify a story within which they lived, and picture their own place in it, as well as locating all the life and landscape around them.

The cities appeared, and kings, and emperors, who took to themselves the title of divine, and exercised control - they claimed - over all the resources the people needed.  As king fought king, and empires rose and fell, many people sheltered in the cities, while beyond the walls, the slaves and peasants continued to fish, farm, and hunt.

Is that when humans began to look less closely at, as well as appreciate less, the plants, animals, and things that we use for nourishment, medicine, comfort, and clothing?  When their gratitude shifted to the kings and emperors?

Those hunter-gatherers were living in, and respecting, the world that gave them being, nurtured them, and took them at their end - sometimes even brought about their end.  Their civilized cousins had walled themselves in, putting the natural world at a greater distance, though the enemy that had inspired the wall was actually other people.

We live in that same world - it is still the source of all, excepting sunlight, that we need for life and comfort.  In the case of sunlight, the atmosphere that filters that light, and protects us from its excesses, exists only because of life.

Yet every year it seems that more and more humans reach adulthood with no real knowledge or understanding of the world we rely on.  How can we have respect for our home if we do not understand it?

Baba Dioum wrote: "In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught"

The world we live in is complex beyond our ability to fully understand. Our brains, facing a flood of data, have developed mechanisms to filter and sort through all that information.  We seek patterns in the data, and try to develop a sense of cause and effect for every thing we see, hear, feel, taste, and sense. We seek a sense of certainty and safety, and tailor our stories accordingly.

Yet, when we have made for ourselves a story that is comforting in its certainties, we have placed ourselves at risk of real harm. We know our world only partially - it is rare that we can be absolutely certain of our future, even that which is only seconds away.  As for next week, month, or year, certainty is a dangerous illusion.

A story that takes into account such uncertainty, and helps us reach for the skills and resilience we might use when the unexpected arrives, is a better story - and, who knows, the unexpected might be more wonderful than we have imagined?

A comfortable story is a risky story because it can lead us into a sense of false security, so that we do not pay such careful attention to the world around us - its inhabitants and their behaviour.  It is when you stop paying attention that the nasty surprises can sneak up on you, and the serendipitous opportunities slip by unnoticed.  But attentiveness and alertness use energy, and we humans have another useful habit - we like to conserve energy.  Some might call it laziness, some might call it sensible, but our ancestors learned not to burn energy unnecessarily, especially when their next meal might not eventuate as soon as hoped for.  Like all human traits, it has its up sides and its down sides.

To survive and flourish, we need a story that makes sense of the world we live in, and gives us purpose, hope, and direction. With the aid of our ancestors, we learn and develop a story by which we live.  Each of us has our own unique story - though it may contain many elements in common with the stories of those around us, it also is built from moments of personal experience and thought that no one else can fully share.

Our story is also influenced by the stories we hear and see - and many of the stories we encounter in the media or online are not honest tales.  In many cases they are created, constructed, designed, and polished so as to distort our personal story in ways that benefit the makers of those stories.  Yes, you can think "advertisers" or "politicians" when you read those words, and you would be partly right, but there are others creating and foisting dodgy stories on the world, and doing so for reasons not always explicable or reputable.

Many of the stories that wash over us every day have very narrow interests at their heart, and if we are to create an honest and useful story for our own life we need to be able to discern which of those  stories should be discarded, and which ones kept. To do that, I think we need to spend time with other people that is not filtered or mediated by technology, and when we have had our fill of people, we need time in nature - real nature, not pictures and sounds on the screen or page. 

Real people and real nature enter our story by way of all our senses, not just the visual and auditory - perhaps that is why the poetry and writing that most moves us contains cues for all our senses, too.

Homo Narrans, waving the flag, or not.

The text books refer to humans as Homo Sapiens - Man the wise - but there are many who think we are better named as Homo Narrans - Man the storyteller.  How crucial to each of us is our story - who we think we are, where we think we came from, and where we think we are going.

If you don't think this is so, consider the orphan - how often people who discover that they are orphans will go to incredible lengths to find their biological parents.  The library shelves are thick with books describing the journeys of people in search of their stories, their ancestry, their families; fiction, non-fiction, memoir, or biography, they are among the most borrowed books in the collection.

Perhaps, deep down, we all have an instinct for just how much of our family story - our people's story - has gone missing in transmission.  Stories are lost when illness, accident, plague, war, or disaster come unexpectedly upon a people.

If you are the bearer of a name such as Griffiths, Weekes, Weadon, Jones, or Davies, then there will be gaps in the stories of you and your past, as the Cymro went through a time, not so long ago, where they were forbidden the use of their own language even in their own land, Cymru, and thus, the proper telling of their stories.  Even now, most of us will call your ancestors The Welsh - a name derived from a Saxon word for foreigner - thus naming them as strangers in their own land, as less worthy than those who conquered.

Are you perhaps a Campbell, a Riley or a Munro?  How many stories were extinguished from among the tales of your ancestors as the armies of the Romans and the Danes and the Saxons and the Norman kings marched to and fro across the green hills or Britain and Ireland.  How many more stories were wiped from memory in the mud of Flanders, or The Blitz, or on the beaches of Normandy?

How fascinated have we been, over the years, by the books and movies that tell us some part of those stories that have fallen out of our family trees? How many peoples, all around the world, are presently struggling to keep alive their story, their tongue, their tales - often in the face of conquest either military or economic?

There is hardly a place on this planet that has not suffered the bitter storms of conflict and conquest at some time in recent centuries, many are presently in the throes of such horror as we sit here - and in most of those places, there are survivors, trying desperately to keep their story alive.  Their stories are no less worthy of being told or being heard because they or their ancestors were outnumbered or outgunned or susceptible to the deseases brought by the invaders.

In Australia, the descendants of those who were here before 1788 have kept alive a wonderful fund of stories to offer to the national story, despite the terrible holes torn in the ranks of their story tellers by bullets, germs, poison, and dispossession.  It is terrible to think of how much was lost during those times.

There are many still living among the First Peoples who recall being punished for speaking in their own language, just as the Welsh were, years ago, in Wales, and so many others were, or are, in other places around the world.  It is not the only place such things have happened, and, sadly, it is likely to happen again in other times and places.

Here in Australia, on Australia Day, there are still those - even among those who govern - who are trying to pretend that the voices of those that were here before 1788 should not be heard, that their stories should not, or need not be told, or, if they feel they must tell them, that they should speak them softly, so as not to offend.  The nation would be a richer and better place if all its stories, of all its people, were given equal places in the greater tale that is Australia.

Seeing the Trees within the Forest

In her book Understory, Inga Simpson shows that no matter how well you know a place, and how long you might live there, you can always be surprised by some new aspect of its shape, its story, and its inhabitants.  She shows, too, how perceptions can be shaped by the stories we have heard about the place and the assumptions we bring with us to that place - and how this can sometimes blind us to significant facets of the place and its stories.

Almost forty years ago, soon after I had moved to a valley that had once been the forested home of the Darkinjung People, I was working behind the bar at the Tavern that was the hub of the larger of the two villages in The Valley.  Wollombi drew its name, it was believed, from the language of those prior occupants, and signified either a meeting of waters, or a meeting place near the waters.  The other village was smaller, had a Spanish name - Laguna, possibly from a former soldier of Wellesley's Peninsula Campaign - and possessed only a Wine Bar.

A stranger of around fifty years of age came into the bar and bought a beer - he looked around and eventually asked after certain local names and families - many of them unknown to we newer residents, and most, long departed.  He was not, it turned out, a stranger to The Valley, but we were strangers to him. He had grown up in a narrow gully at the back of one of the many dairy farms that dotted the area during World War Two. After the war, he had left in search of work, as so many young men did.  Indeed, by the time I moved there, only one dairy was still operating, and the family that ran it were all well past retirement age.

He asked me, after a while "What happened to the hills?  Why did they let the place go like this?"

I asked what he meant, and he launched into a story about the hard work done by he and others, during and just after the war.  He pointed out the many forested ridges that surrounded the basin in which the village sat, nestled at the confluence of three small rivers.

"We had all those ridges clear" he said indignantly "and now they've let all the trees grow back"

He and his fathers, uncles, and neighbours, had ring-barked almost every tree on all the ridges visible from the tavern (which had been a wine bar, too, when he was young) and many other ridges further up and downstream.  He obviously felt that all their sweat and hard work had been wasted through neglect - he thought that the current landholders should have been vigilant and active in preventing any regrowth by trees. 

His tone and words told me that he believed that what they had done had been the right thing - an effort to expand the area of pasture available to the local dairies, at a time when the production of milk and butter was a vital contribution to the war effort, and a valuable addition to the local economy.  No doubt that was the story told to the farmers by the agricultural advisors of the day.

Now the hills were covered in forest again - a thriving mix of Ironbark, Stringybark, Grey Gum, Rough Barked Apple, and Blue Gum - and no local farmer would think to clear those steeper slopes again.

The erosion had been terrible, and long stretches of the Brook and of Yango Creek had seen deep, fish-filled waterholes fill with sand.  The grass growth had been worse without trees than with, and the forests were now valued as a resource that could be selectively cut through for logs, pit timber, fence posts, and firewood, as well as providing sheltered areas for the cattle during the worst of the heat and cold.

The new arrivals and younger people in the bar at the time were astounded at the story he told of dust, sweat, and hillsides covered in stark, silver-grey skeletons of the earlier forests - to us, the existing forests looked as if they had always been there - and yet he had been helping to kill those former forests only forty years earlier.  It was not the first time, either, as I subsequently was shown a very old photo of the hill behind the Wine Bar at Laguna, and it, too, was bereft of trees, though earlier and later photos showed plenty of them on the hill behind the buildings.  That picture dated to the end of the nineteenth centurey.  It seems the the fortunes of the local forest ebbed and flowed over the decades.

The few members of the older families still living in the area could have told us that story, though none did - directly.  One old ex-dairyman liked to recall, in a puzzled voice, how the area had been suddenly swamped by a surfeit of wombats, and that this had happened at the same time as all the koalas had vanished.  It was a mystery, he said, that no one had ever explained.

If we looked closely enough, the clues were there.  Although the trees that were killed in the great ringbarking effort had mostly fallen or been felled, and had been burned in piles, or carted away for firewood many years before that afternoon in The Tavern, there were still ancient stumps - mossy and half rotten - lurking in the shade of the new forest.  The man's story opened my eyes, and I soon found many more stumps as I walked the shady hillsides - some of them of a truly remarkable size.

One day, I wandered up across the western ridge of my farm - I had not had it long and was still exploring it a bit at a time.  I found a half a dozen truly enormous Blue Gums - tall, straight, and metres in circumference.  I wondered how such trees had survived, but the clue was in the shape of the gully they grew in - the confirmation came a while later when I talked to one of the older timber cutters in the area.

His comment?  "That gully had a double dog-leg in it.  The logs wouldn't shoot down, couldn't get a dozer up there to drag them out, and couldn't get a track close enough on the ridge top to winch them up.  We had to leave them"  He sounded so disappointed that he was never able to find a way to get at those trees.

Later on, I heard a story about trees that were even bigger, and still standing.  At the end of a narrow dirt road that snaked along the ridges of the Watagan Range, and plunged down deep, shady gullies to the upper reaches of the Brook that flowed through my paddocks, a small clearing had been set aside within the State Forest for campers.  The trees that surrounded that clearing, on the banks of a clear, pebbly stream, were huge.  Five or six people might have been able to link hands around the trunk of one of the smaller ones; to see their tops seemed impossible - they were too close to the clouds.

The Darkingjung, Awabakal, and Wonnarua Peoples walked among vast forests of such trees for tens of thousands of years - now a few dozen of those trees remain in odd corners of the range to remind us of what once was here.  When I had first bought the hundred acres of creek flat and ridge country that was to be my farm, I had walked among trees that seemed astounding in their size - yet it seems that almost all of them were barely moving into a stage we could call mature, especially compared to those might Grandfather Trees still lurking in their hidden corners.

I had made that all too common human mistake, and assumed that what I could see was what had always been that way.  In truth, that is so rarely the case, and if we look and listen carefully, the stories that will tell us what had gone before, and what might come again, are there, waiting.  But don't leave it too long - so many of those older story tellers are leaving us, and leaving behind no written or pictorial record.

Among the Trees

Inga Simpson has, with her latest work A Life with Trees, given us a poignant story of the constant tension between the dreams and desires we humans try to impose on "our" land, and the drives and needs of the manifold occupants - plant and animal - that were in and on that land before us, or that have arrived from elsewhere to enjoy the side-effects our decisions and actions have wrought upon that land.

Within its pages there is a resonance with my own life amid tree and pasture, and the attachment I formed to the landscapes within which I lived, and, at times, made my living.  Like her, I have moved more than once, and cleared and planted, trying to add my dreams and desires to the existing ecology, and like her I have had to compromise between dreams and the counter forces of nature and economics.

I have been enchanted by the grandeur of a place, and by the miniscule wonder and beauty that reveal themselves to the quiet traveller or sojourner.  The first view of any landscape, large or small, always contains more than the observer can take in.  We think we see it all, but our brain, as it usually does when confronted with large amounts of information via the senses, filters and simplifies - bringing to our consciousness the "big picture" first, and then the more easily identifiable aspects, with an emphasis on things about which we already have some knowledge.

Another view, in different light, weather, or season, and different aspects are highlighted - the big picture changes shape and gains texture.  Finer details begin to come to our notice, until we make that all too common mistake and think we know all about the place, and fully understand it.

Then the light changes again, or the temperature, or rain falls, or fails to fall when expected - and the view changes again as we notice previously overlooked details.  Carefuly nurtured plants die of drought, drowning, or unseen disease, while self-sown seedlings that weren't obvious only weeks before are suddenly flourishing.  Perhaps they were there all along, rendered invisible by our ignorance, or even misidentified as weeds.

Mature trees that somehow escaped notice for years, even as we lamented the absence of that species, appear under our nose (or over our heads), and supposedly rare and endangered ground orchids suddenly, and briefly, carpet a ridge top in flowers - no matter how long we dwell in a place, it can always surprise us.  And so we add to our knowledge of place, and as the surprise fades, we again grow smug about our understanding - until the next new discovery.

The store of knowledge contained in Indigenous lore is astounding, but should not surprise - there have been many millenia of gathering knowledge, arranging it, piecing it together, and passing it on for future generations.  The Australian First Peoples have been living with this place for so long that they have seen it change as the most recent glaciation cooled the planet and lowered the oceans, and they have seen it change back as the planet warmed.

They have seen old homes and fishing spots drowned by the rising oceans, and adapted as deserts grew, and forests moved and changed - all the while adding their observations and understanding to the songs that hold their memory.  Now they are seeing it change again, as human technological ability and desire for dominance once more overtakes human understanding and ethics.

A lifetime cannot be enough for a complete understanding of a place, an ecology - be it a forest, as in Inga's case, or a shore, or a marsh.  When trees can live for centuries, even passing a millenia or more in the sun and the wind, how can one person ever fully understand a forest?  But that person can live in the forest, and learn its rhythms, and love it -though those people who choose such a path are ever more often finding themselves at odds with that other branch of humanity, who, for whatever reason, see in a forest only a short term picture comprised of dollar gains and dollar costs.

Humans are creatures of story, and it is story-tellers like Inga who help people see the view that they may not previously have noticed - to see the intricate, essential to all of us, life that, without such seeing, they could too easily trample underfoot, or consign to the blade of the bulldozer or the teeth of the chainsaw.

Understory tells of that tension between the needs imposed by "economics" and "society", and the needs of life itself - the constantly growing, moving web that makes our world liveable and beautiful, and without which no amount of money or economic growth would be of any use to the human race at all.  It is a story that has been told in other forms, about other places, by so many people - it needs constant re-telling, for all our sakes.

Flowers of Memory - the Travelling Rose

My wife and a colleague were discussing a practice at some childcare centres where a child is given a seedling of a tree or bush to care for - when they are old enough to leave for school they can either take the growing tree home to plant or to the school if permission is given for it to be  planted there.

It made me recall the plants that have travelled with me as I have moved from place to place - there is the thornless, yellow, banksia rose that has come to each new place as a cutting from the place I had just left.

It is here at Wentworth falls as both a hedging plant and as a bonsai, cuttings of which I brought with me from a bush at our last house in Quakers Hill, which was struck from the rose that climbed over the outside dunny at the farm at Glyn Marchog, which was struck from the one I grew at the Old Northern Trading Post.

That, in turn, was cut from the yellow rose that climbed with the black muscat grapes across the north and west sides of the veranda at the farm at Murray's Run (about 8 or 9 kms from the village), which in turn came from the one near the house at Toongabbie, which was struck from the one my grandfather had by his aviary at Killarney Vale, which he grew from cuttings of the big one that climbed about the barn and cottage at North Parramatta, which, finally, was struck from the one next to the house at the family dairy at Wentworth Falls, around the end of World War 2.

What a journey, over the course of generations, in the form of carefully nurtured cuttings carried from old homes to new homes, that rose has made.  I wonder if the yellow banksia rose that I found growing among the weeds on a fence line here at Gwenmere shared a common parent with the ones that were growing on the dairy that once stood only three kilometres or so from where I now type?

This house stands on the same side of Jamieson Creek, though a bit further upstream, as did the dairy that fed and employed a great-grandfather, grandfather and grandmother, great-aunt, father, uncles and aunt, and assorted cousins, fosterlings, and boys from other properties about the village.  The yellow banksia rose is often seen climbing over fences in the village, especially in the older parts - sometimes in company with a beautiful white flowering sibling.  Gandpa had some of the white rose, too, but it seemed less robust than the yellow, and did not complete the long, roundabout journey with its sister and I.

Of course, there are other plants that have travelled with me too - in pots, or as cuttings or seeds or seedlings.  The bonsais are easy to move, the great lumping orchid pots less so - but they too have a long history.  Some of the orchids were handed on from grandpa, some from an old man across a long ago fence, whose  departed wife had nurtured them and won ribbons for their beautiful blooms, back in the forties, fifties, and sixties - probably in the same orchid society grandpa attended.

All of them have stories longer than my memory, and many parts of those stories are now forgotten.

How sad that is.  Here in Australia there are folk from the First Peoples who are trying to save the language and stories of their ancestors - just as other people in other lands are also doing for their own stories.  It must be terribly difficult for them when they have so often been pushed far away from the lands in which their stories grew and flourished.

My heritage is, from what I can find in the records, mostly Anglo-Celtic.  Those peoples, too, had a time in their past when the stories and genealogies were passed on from old to young through song and poetry.  The Celtic Bards were famous for the vast storehouse of information that they carried in the memory.

But was it just "in their heads"?  Or, was it, like so many of the Australian Aboriginal songs and stories, intimately linked to the landscape - the rocks, hills, streams, lakes, trees and plants, animals and insects?  Was that a part of the terrible shock so many of the early European arrivals seemed to suffer?  That their stories were adrift, unmoored, and unattached to the landscape they now walked through?

We define ourselves and our world with our stories.  The plants I have carried with me for so many decades are linked to stories and characters now long past - but not forgotten, thanks to those gorgeous blossoms that remind me each year of the other people and places in that long story of my family.

If I travel through those places where, in past years, I settled for a while, I can still find signs of my presence - flowers and trees I planted - houses, fences, barns and stockyards I built.  I can see them and straight away be pulled back into the memories of the people and happenings that made up my life in that place.  Though one place I find it hard to drive past, knowing that house I had built there, and the trees and gardens I planted and cared for, have all vanished beneath carpark paving and a double line of townhouses.

How awful it must be to be cast out of the landscape - by war or migration - in which your story was formed, or to have the landscape torn up and replaced with something alien - as so often happens now in The City on The Plain - Sydney - as the developers and politicians tear down the landmarks of so many stories in pursuit of dollars and power.